The Treeless Place
by Bellerophone
Summary: A novelization of Ocarina of Time, with my interpretations and characterizations worked in. To be continued!
1. Prologue

This story begins and ends with dreams. But for the dreamer himself, the word 'begins' has no meaning. He does not remember a time without dreams. They were his first thoughts, his first memories, his first companions, and though some of them faded, the pressure of them lingered within him like a weight next to his heart. Silver people, four-legged beasts, huge stone buildings, fire, jumbled shining shapes, a strange girl with strange eyes, blue eyes—like the snatches of moonlight that slipped through the trees to shine on the deep pools of the Lost Woods these images shimmered across his slumber —and most of all, dreams of a place without trees: a huge, stretching place of only grass, waving for miles, and a sky of uninterrupted blue, wide and open and clear and free.

Once, the dreamer tried to explain this place to the others, about how there were no trees to obstruct the sky and no roots knit into the endless grassy sea. The more he spoke, however, the more horrified they became.

"No trees?" demanded Mido. "You mean kill the trees?"

"No! The trees were just—never there. It was always just grass."

"There have always been trees," Saria murmured. "Link…"

"I knew something was wrong with you, Link," Mido declared.

So after that, he stopped telling people about his dreams. He had always been different—smaller, weaker, less intelligent—and now they thought he was deranged. No wonder he didn't have a fairy! He fell silent. Most of the others spoke to him, if not kindly, then condescendingly, but Mido was persistently furious, and Saria was his only true friend.

For fear of losing even her, the dreamer didn't tell her when his dreams began to change. The grass withered and burned, turned red and brown; above, ash and fog darkened his skies to impenetrable black. He saw shapes prowling the flames, shadows that snapped and hissed—then the strange blue-eyed girl flew by, on a white four-legged beast—she looked at him and he shivered—and then the largest of the dark shapes emerged from the flames—a towering giant of black stone and yellow eyes, with hair that burned red on his skull. The giant looked from the girl to the dreamer—

"Link!"

The dreamer shuddered.

"Link! Wake up!"

He felt prickly, unrested, muddled. He buried his head in the pillow.

"Link, get up! The Great Deku Tree wants to see us now!"


	2. Prologue pt 2

Link opened his eyes to a piercing, baffling blue light. He quickly shut them again. "Goodness!" pealed a shrill voice. "Can the fate of Hyrule really depend on such a lazy boy?"

His face was tingling. He shuddered.

_The treeless place…in flames…_

"Link!" the shrill voice shrieked. "Get—up—now!"

Link shot upright as if electrified. The flames were gone. He was in bed, in his own tree—and above him, the shrill noises were coming from a small, winged blue ball of light. He tried to speak, but a yawn escaped him instead. "Mmph?"

"I'm Navi!"squeaked the fairy in a high-pitched, singsong voice. "I'm your fairy now, Link, and we've got to go see the Great Deku Tree; he wants to see you!"

Something of comprehension began to dawn on Link's sleepy face. He leaped up and looked at Navi expectantly.

"Well, come on!" said the fairy, rather snippily. "Let's get going!"

Link crossed his small room, feeling very conscious of the fairy hovering about his head, pushed aside the heavy curtain in the doorframe, and stepped out onto a front deck attached to the tree house in which he lived.

"Hey, Link!"

He peered over the side. A green-clad girl with gangly arms and legs ran up and stopped at the foot of the ladder, waving at him. She had green eyes and hair, and pale skin the color of forest lichen.

"Link! Come to the forest! The Skullkids want to play ocarina with you!"

"Saria!" Link exclaimed at the same time. "I can do a backflip now!"

"Oh, Link!" Saria stopped beneath his tree and looked up, her hands clasped. "Can you really?"

Link jumped down the ladder and Saria grabbed his hand.

"Come on, come show me!" They ran back the way she had come, into the center of the village, the quite-forgotten fairy trailing along in their wake.

The tree trunks were further apart here, but the canopy of leaves and branches was just as thick. The grassy ground was smoother, less knotted with roots, and a cool, clear river wound around the tree-houses. It was here that Link stopped. He let go of Saria's hand and she stepped back, her eyes patiently upon him as he bent his knees and stepped on the springy turf of the riverbank. Then, quite abruptly he jumped up, performed a tight backflip, and landed without a wobble. Saria cried out in delight.

"Oh, Link!" Saria ran over to him. "Fantastic!"

Link beamed. "Want me to help you do it?"

"Oh, no," Saria smiled back.

"It—it's not hard!"

"No, I can't," said Saria, her smile unchanged.

"I'm sure you can." Link took her hand again, and said slowly, "I did it by the water so I wouldn't get hurt until I did it."

Saria did not pull away, but she looked down at him—she was half a head taller—and said, still smiling, "Link. I can't."

Link stared back for a moment, uncomprehending.

She giggled. "Show me again!"

So Link, determined to backflip even further this time, scrambled up onto a tree stump and turned his back towards a neighboring stump. He bent his knees and sprang—but he realized immediately he had jumped too far backwards and not high enough. Arms flailing, he twisted to his side and narrowly avoided a backwards face-plant as his feet struck the stump on which he had been trying to land.

"Link!" Saria cried. She raced to his side, one hand clapped over her mouth. "Are you okay?"

Link nodded, his cheeks red. Saria giggled.

"Now can we go see the Great Deku Tree?" the fairy buzzed in his ear. "He is waiting, you know."

"The Great Deku Tree wants to see you?" Saria gasped. "How exciting! Let's go, Link!" She pulled him to his feet. "It's this way!"

Holding hands, they set off east through the tree-village, past the tree where Saria lived by the forest edge, and arrived at a narrow path between the ancient tree-trunks down which Link had never been permitted to go. Saria released Link's hand. "Go on!"

"Go on where?" snapped someone from behind them.

Link and Saria turned around. A young boy marched duck-footed up to them and planted his hands on his hips. He was thinner than Link and slightly taller, with pale freckled skin like a quail's egg, straw-colored blonde hair beneath a green cap, a jutting chin, plump cheeks. and eyes the dark blue of a twilit forest, which he narrowed as he looked at Link.

"Well? What do you think you're doing? And why're you smiling?"

"The Great Deku Tree wants to see me," Link said softly, but his smile grew bigger with every word, so that Saria smiled to see him beaming so widely. "And I can do a backflip, Mido!"

Mido crossed his skinny arms. "Big deal. So can the Know-It-All Brothers."

"But now I can, too," Link said, bemused.

"Yes, you already said that," Mido said cruelly.

"But…" Link said slowly, frowning. "I couldn't…and now I can."

"Saying it over and over won't make it interesting," Mido snapped. "Anyway, there's no way I'm letting you see the Great Deku Tree."

"But—"

"Nope!"

"Mido!" Saria admonished.

"Saria, why do you even hang around with this guy?" Mido protested. "He doesn't even have a fairy—"

"Oh yes he does!" the blue fairy burst furiously out from under Link's hat. "My name is Navi, and the Great Deku Tree sent me to this boy just this morning. He wants to see him! Goodness!"

Mido, whose jaw had dropped, now crossed his arms again.

"What a rude fairy! There's no way I'm letting Link see the Great Deku Tree." He plopped onto the ground in the center of the path.

Link, his cheeks red and his heart rather tight-feeling, might have given up and gone home. But before he could turn around, or before Saria and Navi could argue, the ground rumbled beneath their feet. Link, Saria and Mido turned to look down the dark forest path. A breeze brushed their faces, which rustled the leaves and set the thinner trees creakily swaying. And through the noise of the moving forest, they heard a low, wooden voice: "Link…"

Mido jumped to his feet.

"I'm here, Deku Tree!"

But the forest returned: "….Link…"

"But I'm the chief!" Mido exclaimed.

The wind only howled louder.

"All right!" Mido screamed into the deafening rustle of leaves and creaking of branches. "All right! He's coming!"

The wind subsided. Link peered at the now-silent path. It was still dark and overhung with foliage, and he could not see where it ended.

"Go on then," Mido said huffily. Link looked around at him. Mido's pale cheeks were pink and he scowled darkly. "Get on with it! And Link—" he added as Link began nervously to step past him. Mido ogled Link as if he were trying to speak; he lifted his chin and the chords in his neck taughtened. "Link…you muddle everything up." He crossed his arms and dropped his chin. "Go!"

Link glanced at Saria, then sprinted away down the path, Navi bobbing along in his wake.


End file.
